by Mike Mudrey, The 601 Group
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about customer experience, although the more I think about it, the more I think what I really mean is hospitality. How someone feels when they walk into one of our places. Whether they feel noticed. Whether somebody is paying enough attention to recognize what they need before they necessarily have to ask for it. As we get closer to opening the new For Crepe Sake in downtown East Lansing, I’ve found myself thinking about this more and more. We’ve spent months on the equipment, kitchen flow, menu, seating, lighting, signage, drinks, throughput and seemingly every other detail of the space. I’m beginning to think one of the most important things we need to get right won’t show up on a floor plan at all.
That thinking is part of what led me to pick up Horst Schulze’s Excellence Wins. Schulze helped build Ritz-Carlton into what it became and has spent decades thinking about service and hospitality at a level few people have. I’m only about halfway through the book, but what has surprised me most is how familiar so much of it feels. I picked it up because hospitality is obviously becoming a much bigger part of my life through the 601 Group. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that maybe I haven’t entered the hospitality business at all. Maybe I’ve been in it for a long time and just never thought of it that way.
I’ve spent more than a decade at World 50. We aren’t a hotel company or a restaurant company. We build communities of senior executives and create environments where they can develop relationships, learn from each other and have conversations they usually can’t have anywhere else. But when I think about some of the things that make World 50 what it is, a lot of them are really hospitality.
World 50 started in Atlanta, and I spent my first five years with the company working there. The thinking of Ritz-Carlton and Horst Schulze was very much in the orbit of the company, and stories from Ritz-Carlton were actually part of how we were trained. The lesson was almost always some version of the same thing: pay attention. Don’t just respond to what somebody asks for. Notice what is happening around you and try to anticipate what they might need.
You still see it at almost every World 50 gathering. A member yawns in a session and somebody on our team notices. A few minutes later, a latte or cup of coffee quietly appears over their shoulder. Someone looks cold or starts rubbing their arms and a pashmina shows up. Nobody asked for either one. Those are admittedly tiny examples, but I think that’s why they matter. The member probably won’t go home talking about the coffee or the pashmina. They may not consciously remember either one. They just know that the experience felt different because someone was paying attention.
One of the stories our CEO, David, used to tell us in training was about a guest at a Ritz-Carlton whose shoes somehow disappeared after being left out overnight to be polished. The guest had an important meeting early the next morning and was understandably panicked. David would stop the story there and ask us what we thought the hotel should do. People would say reimburse him, comp the room or send someone to buy another pair. But it was the middle of the night or early enough that no shoe stores were open.
The version of the story we were taught was that the hotel team took off their own shoes, lined them up and invited the guest to come out and find a pair that fit and would work for his meeting. I have no idea whether every part of that story has survived exactly as it happened after being retold for decades, but I still remember it probably 10 or 12 years after first hearing it. The point wasn’t really the shoes anyway. It was that “there’s nothing we can do” wasn’t considered an acceptable answer.
We also talked a lot about the Ritz-Carlton practice of giving employees the authority to spend as much as $2,000 to solve a guest problem without finding a manager first. I don’t think the important part of that story is the $2,000. Most situations don’t require anything remotely close to that. What stuck with me was the idea that the person standing closest to the guest was trusted to make a decision. You can tell people all day long that they are responsible for the customer experience, but if they have to find three layers of management to fix a relatively simple problem, they aren’t really responsible for it.
All of that connects to the Ritz-Carlton phrase that Schulze is probably most associated with: “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” I’ve heard that phrase for years, but I’m thinking about it differently now that I’m responsible for people working in restaurants. There is something important in the fact that the dignity runs in both directions. It’s not just about treating the guest exceptionally well. It says something about the person doing the serving too. There’s professionalism and pride in being really good at taking care of people, and leadership has a responsibility to give people the training and the ability to do it well.
About halfway through Excellence Wins, Schulze tells a story that sent me down this whole path again. Years ago, he was meeting with the Chick-fil-A team and talking about some of the things Ritz-Carlton did. He mentioned that when a guest thanked someone at Ritz-Carlton, the response was “My pleasure.” Truett Cathy liked it. Schulze apparently wasn’t entirely convinced that language from an ultra-luxury hotel belonged in a quick-service restaurant, but Cathy kept coming back to it. He liked “My pleasure.”
It is such a small thing, but look at what happened with it. Today, you hear “My pleasure” and immediately think of Chick-fil-A. There isn’t anything magical about the words. In fact, if the rest of the experience were terrible, saying “My pleasure” at the end of it would probably make things worse. What I find interesting is that Chick-fil-A took a broad idea about how it wanted people to feel and turned one piece of it into something extremely specific that everyone could understand and repeat.
That’s where I’ve started looking harder at our own businesses.
At The Local Epicurean in East Lansing and Grand Rapids, I think we’re fairly close to creating the kind of hospitality I want us to be known for. The business gives us a head start because the experience itself is so personal. People are with us for a couple of hours. They make pasta, cook together, spend time with an instructor and eventually sit down to eat what they’ve made. We have couples celebrating anniversaries, friends getting together, families spending time with each other and corporate teams trying to have an experience together that doesn’t feel like another meeting. There are all kinds of opportunities during those few hours to make somebody feel special.
And I see our people do that. What I don’t think we have done yet is define enough of it. A lot of the great experiences happen because we have people who naturally know how to take care of others. That’s wonderful, but it also means the experience can depend too much on who happens to be working that night. If we want to grow The Local Epicurean and build other concepts around it, at some point we need to be able to explain what a 601 hospitality experience actually means.
I think we are farther away at the crêperies. I also think that is much more our fault as leaders than it is the fault of the people working there. We haven’t trained it consistently enough. We haven’t told people specifically enough what good looks like, and we haven’t always reinforced it when we see it or when we don’t. At Brown Butter and the current For Crepe Sake, we’ve also put the team into a physical environment that makes a lot of this harder. The space is tiny, the workflow has evolved over the years and when it gets busy, everyone is mostly trying to survive the rush and keep the food moving.
It would be easy for me to walk in, see someone who didn’t acknowledge a guest quickly enough and conclude that we have a service problem. But if that person is trying to work around a bad layout, cover three things at once and keep up with tickets, then we also have a leadership and design problem. We can’t make the job unnecessarily difficult and then be surprised when people spend all of their energy doing the things directly in front of them.
That is one of the reasons I’m so interested in what we can do with the new For Crepe Sake. We’re getting a chance that you don’t get very often in an operating business: to start almost completely over. We have a bigger space, a completely different line, more capacity, a broader menu, more seating and a bar program. We’ve spent an almost embarrassing amount of time thinking about where every piece of equipment should sit and how people will move through the restaurant. I’ve probably thought more about the width and height of equipment stands over the last few months than any reasonable person should.
But if we get all of that right and don’t change the way people feel when they come in, then I don’t think we will have taken full advantage of the opportunity.
I want us to think just as deliberately about what happens when somebody walks through the door. Does someone acknowledge them even if the register is busy? What happens when someone is staring at the menu and obviously has no idea what they want? If a child drops a crêpe on the floor, does the employee standing there already know what to do or do they have to find a manager? If an order is taking too long, do we notice it ourselves or wait until someone gets frustrated enough to tell us? If we make a mistake, what can the person standing closest to the guest do immediately to make it right?
I keep describing what I want as ultra-premium hospitality, which may sound strange when we’re talking about a crêperie. I actually like the contradiction. There is no reason exceptional hospitality has to be reserved for people paying $1,000 a night at a hotel or having dinner in a fine dining restaurant. Somebody buying a $15 or $20 lunch can still walk away feeling like the people there genuinely cared that they came in.
That, I think, is part of what makes the Chick-fil-A story so interesting. They didn’t try to turn a chicken restaurant into Ritz-Carlton. They took something from the philosophy of luxury hospitality and realized that it wasn’t really about luxury. It was about the way one person treats another person.
The more I think about this, the more I also think we need to be careful not to solve it by creating a bunch of slogans. Telling the team to “deliver exceptional service” doesn’t do very much. What does that actually mean when there are eight orders on the screen and a line at the door? It probably means we need to get much more specific about the little things, and then train and talk about them often enough that they eventually become natural.
That is where “My pleasure” keeps coming back to me. I don’t think we need our own clever phrase, and I certainly don’t want to copy Chick-fil-A. What I’m interested in is everything underneath those two words. Somebody made a decision about the kind of experience they wanted to create. They turned that decision into a behavior that could be taught. Then they did it long enough and consistently enough that the behavior became part of the company.
I picked up Schulze’s book because I thought I was learning more about a field I’m moving into. Instead, I’ve spent much of the first half realizing how much of it I’ve already been around. World 50 taught me what it feels like when an organization pays extraordinary attention to people. For years, I’ve watched team members notice a small need in a room full of executives and quietly take care of it without being asked. I just didn’t necessarily think of that as hospitality at the time.
With The 601 Group, I’m on the other side of it. We have to create the standards, train them and build an environment where people can actually live up to them. I’m not sure yet exactly what all of those standards will be, and I don’t think we should pretend we have the answer before we’ve done the work. But I know I want the new For Crepe Sake to open differently. Not just with a better kitchen, a better menu and a better space, but with much more intention around how we take care of people.
Maybe that is what I’ve been circling around in thinking about all of this. It took getting into the restaurant business for me to realize that I’ve been in the hospitality business for most of my career. I’m just now responsible for building it myself.
Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.
I think I’m finally beginning to understand what that requires.
- Mike